In case you're really interested, Cheapass Games http://www.cheapass.com/ have a system where they sell you the basic parts of a game, like just the rules, or the rules and a cheap gameboard, etc., and expect you to get pawns, dice, chips, etc., from other games.
In case you don't have any others, or don't want to scavenge them for pieces, they sell an assortment of playing pieces and miscellaneous parts for doing this. If you want to design your own game and don't want to ruin any of your others, pick up a couple of these for all the parts you could need.
The Tobacco lawsuits happened because the Tobacco industry intentionally lied about the harmful effects of their products, colluded to contain such information or destroy it, and hire firms to showcase that in fact, cigarette smoking was not harmful to the person smoking or others around them.
They also purposely advertised to children and teenagers to hook new users for life, as their more profitable users were dying of cancer and other illnesses.
Tack on the fact that they mislead their own users by marketing light, low-tar and other cigarettes to make people believe there were healthier cigarettes. There aren't.
Nowadays, if you sue because you're addicted to cigarettes, because you started smoking after the class action lawsuits, then yes, you're a moron. Before then, you had two different arguments about the health effects of cigarettes. And last I saw, the cigarette makers had much more money to promote their side than the US government had to fight it.
Piracy is not a good way to raise the literacy of poor nations at all. Sure, reading is a good way, but look at everything that is already in the public domain, that anyone and everyone can freely distribute, translate, republished, redistribute, etc.
Not only this, but there still are plenty of professional writers who give away short stories for free on their websites.
Same with music. Recorded music's getting more songs in public domain now, and there are musicians giving away their music for free or making it easily accessible for little to no money.
Piracy is not a good way to do anything other than piss off people. There's plenty of legitimate routes to explore where really there's few, if any, people to tick off in the process. And it keeps P2P very legitimate.
I see way too many people use "Information wants to be free" as a quote meaning that content, even entertainment, should be freely distributed. In this instance, that someone's going to free it from its horrible life of earning money. The quote is overused out of context.
Here comes the quote, from _The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT_ by Stewart Brand (1987):
"Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, intellectual property, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better."
It explains equally the two sides of content distribution. One side finds it easier and easier to freely distribute at lower and lower costs, while the other finds that more and more people want the content and can earn money faster and faster with such a demand.
It neither endorses nor condones free distribution, and it's not the full quote. Information wants to be free is solely part of the text, and not meant to be Information wants to be free.
Copyright gives incentive to create. Just because huge corporations abuse their control over copyrighted control does not make copyright itself a bad thing. The GPL/BSD licenses are based on copyright controls, after all.
If you repeal copyright, what's to give anyone any incentive to do anything creative that you would want? Why invest time into recording and engineering a music track, the musical instruments, etc., when there's nothing to stop people from just giving your stuff away, or even putting their own name on it?
They can tour? But without copyright, ANYONE can tour using your music. Maybe someone else is just better than you, or goes to a more crowded location. Suddenly they get more popular off your work and they get more money to play that location again, while you get considered a copycat for stealing their music. No copyright, no reason to attribute the creator of the work, after all.
There's just a stack of reasons why copyright is *necessary*, both for the economy and the livelihood of creative people. Yes, some companies abuse it. Yes, Congress is enacting laws to further the protections against most citizens. But in the long run, it's still a good reason why we're reading Slashdot.
With the SCO lawsuit, FUD from different companies and investment firms, and the need for businesses to have reliable and cost-effective solutions, will RedHat stick with GNU/Linux as its core operating system, or is there any thought to building more than one kernel-based enterprise suite? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.?
In a television interview, one of the people who claim to own all the planets and moons says that the treaty states specifically no _NATION_ can own the planets, so therefore an individual can.
Neverminding that so far, only a handful of men have landed on the moon, and no other planet yet. So good luck trying to enforce any strange loopholes.
No, Playstation 2s are not sold at a loss at all. The retail is hardly more than ten to fifteen dollars over what the wholesaler sells it for, which is sometimes nothing more than ten to fifteen dollars over what the manufacturer sells it to them. That's why you hardly ever see huge single sale prices on consoles; too close to retail already.
And, Playstation 2 is manufactured by Sony, who also owns not only a computer division, but a home electronics division. And they had a major windfall from their original Playstation, so the money going into R&D for the next generation was there.
How hard would it really be to create the hardware for the PS2 all in house for about $200-$240, really? The PS2 is the *only* true in-house console out there.
Microsoft and Nintendo may sell at a loss, but Sony has no reason to do so. The price reductions are more because they've had the items in production long enough and R&D costs recuped that they can bring that price down without a further loss.
Except that the party in this instance was selling chips for laser printer toner cartridges. So it very well could be a third-party company targeting businesses.
But who buys more ink, businesses or people? Most businesses should care how well the ink works in the end. Those important contracts, samples from the art department, financial filings . ..
If the ink sucks and smears even after drying, or fades, or cracks, or is otherwise useless after a very short time, then the business should find an alternative to save itself headaches down the road, even if it costs a bit more.
I'll say this is good because NO company should ever try to lock people into propietary accessories by selling the initial main product at, close to or below cost, hoping to make up their profits by selling the locked-in accessories for a larger portion of the profits.
Look at the Playstation 2. It's locked-in (you must have Sony approve of and produce your game in _most_ instances), yet they make their profits on the game system whether or not you buy any games.
Let's see how long before other companies discover ways to break the models of these lock-ins and force the main company to rethink their strategy of selling short and hoping for bigger profits as time goes on because no one else can sell the accessories at reasonable prices.
The DMCA *does not* allow the ISP or carrier to destroy the items requested to be removed, just to remove them. They cannot destroy them because if the hosted site counterclaims, then the ISP or carrier must put the items back up.
Writers can earn money from in-house commitments, book tours where they further promote their books, public readings that they can be paid for, lectures, guests at conventions and trade shows, prizes from awards, commissions for specific pieces, etc.
No, they can't do a music tour per say, but they definitely have more than royalty checks to earn income.
Isn't having a registrar run the root AND a registry one of the problems that's causing this today?
We need an independent company to run the root, and ensure that their contract states that they can never be a.com or.net registry, even if they're later bought or merged.
Why on earth if someone changes a policy that somehow will affect mass P2P traders, etc., it's some underhanded effort behind the scenes of one of the hated groups, SCO, MS, RIAA, MPAA, etc.?
Could it just be that bandwidth costs money, and some people just use way too much of it? That perhaps this usage could hinder others in the area or across the whole network?
Nah, usual paranoia sets in, it must be the RIAA strongarming them to change their policy so people have to take an extra thirty seconds to download that song off Kazaa . . .
And the software shipping with bad default options.
To this day, why does Microsoft ship Windows with Windows Messaging System turned on and allows connections on port 135? Sure, some businesses need it, but wouldn't it be wiser to shut those completely off by default, and allow competent IT professionals turn them on if they're needed?
That's why companies pay those people the big money, to make things work!
Around here we have a chain of CD/Game pawn shops. They sell new items at retail or roughly close to it. They also sell quite a few more used items.
All of their used CDs are open-cases. They also have a CD deck so they can keep music going at all times. If you want, go by the genre you want (neatly arranged) and find some used CDs of bands you haven't heard before, or maybe that you have but haven't heard the CDs.
Ask the clerk if you can listen to it on the CD deck. They've very cordial about it at this chain. Listen to a few songs. If you're there to buy, they won't mind taking this extra time to help you.
You can also find $2, $1, $.50 and $.25 CDs (budgets), which are just used CDs they either have too many of, or haven't moved for a while. Not all of them are great, but you may find a diamond in the rough, and it won't cost you much.
It'll take some time out of your day, but if you're going to save money, might as well invest some research into doing so.
Slashdot Mirror
In case you're really interested, Cheapass Games http://www.cheapass.com/ have a system where they sell you the basic parts of a game, like just the rules, or the rules and a cheap gameboard, etc., and expect you to get pawns, dice, chips, etc., from other games.
In case you don't have any others, or don't want to scavenge them for pieces, they sell an assortment of playing pieces and miscellaneous parts for doing this. If you want to design your own game and don't want to ruin any of your others, pick up a couple of these for all the parts you could need.
The Tobacco lawsuits happened because the Tobacco industry intentionally lied about the harmful effects of their products, colluded to contain such information or destroy it, and hire firms to showcase that in fact, cigarette smoking was not harmful to the person smoking or others around them.
They also purposely advertised to children and teenagers to hook new users for life, as their more profitable users were dying of cancer and other illnesses.
Tack on the fact that they mislead their own users by marketing light, low-tar and other cigarettes to make people believe there were healthier cigarettes. There aren't.
Nowadays, if you sue because you're addicted to cigarettes, because you started smoking after the class action lawsuits, then yes, you're a moron. Before then, you had two different arguments about the health effects of cigarettes. And last I saw, the cigarette makers had much more money to promote their side than the US government had to fight it.
I think CDNow.com has a patent on this.
I must disagree.
Piracy is not a good way to raise the literacy of poor nations at all. Sure, reading is a good way, but look at everything that is already in the public domain, that anyone and everyone can freely distribute, translate, republished, redistribute, etc.
Not only this, but there still are plenty of professional writers who give away short stories for free on their websites.
Same with music. Recorded music's getting more songs in public domain now, and there are musicians giving away their music for free or making it easily accessible for little to no money.
Piracy is not a good way to do anything other than piss off people. There's plenty of legitimate routes to explore where really there's few, if any, people to tick off in the process. And it keeps P2P very legitimate.
Bryan Adams is making money again!
I see way too many people use "Information wants to be free" as a quote meaning that content, even entertainment, should be freely distributed. In this instance, that someone's going to free it from its horrible life of earning money. The quote is overused out of context.
Here comes the quote, from _The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT_ by Stewart Brand (1987):
"Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, intellectual property, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new (technological) devices makes the tension worse, not better."
It explains equally the two sides of content distribution. One side finds it easier and easier to freely distribute at lower and lower costs, while the other finds that more and more people want the content and can earn money faster and faster with such a demand.
It neither endorses nor condones free distribution, and it's not the full quote. Information wants to be free is solely part of the text, and not meant to be Information wants to be free.
Just debunking an old cliche. Thank you.
Problem:
Copyright gives incentive to create. Just because huge corporations abuse their control over copyrighted control does not make copyright itself a bad thing. The GPL/BSD licenses are based on copyright controls, after all.
If you repeal copyright, what's to give anyone any incentive to do anything creative that you would want? Why invest time into recording and engineering a music track, the musical instruments, etc., when there's nothing to stop people from just giving your stuff away, or even putting their own name on it?
They can tour? But without copyright, ANYONE can tour using your music. Maybe someone else is just better than you, or goes to a more crowded location. Suddenly they get more popular off your work and they get more money to play that location again, while you get considered a copycat for stealing their music. No copyright, no reason to attribute the creator of the work, after all.
There's just a stack of reasons why copyright is *necessary*, both for the economy and the livelihood of creative people. Yes, some companies abuse it. Yes, Congress is enacting laws to further the protections against most citizens. But in the long run, it's still a good reason why we're reading Slashdot.
I'd suggest more people are now using bit torrent to get those big files. Saves server loads and sometimes is faster.
With the SCO lawsuit, FUD from different companies and investment firms, and the need for businesses to have reliable and cost-effective solutions, will RedHat stick with GNU/Linux as its core operating system, or is there any thought to building more than one kernel-based enterprise suite? FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.?
In a television interview, one of the people who claim to own all the planets and moons says that the treaty states specifically no _NATION_ can own the planets, so therefore an individual can.
Neverminding that so far, only a handful of men have landed on the moon, and no other planet yet. So good luck trying to enforce any strange loopholes.
Didn't Late Night with Conan O'Brien do this, but with jingle writers, to see who was best?
No, Playstation 2s are not sold at a loss at all. The retail is hardly more than ten to fifteen dollars over what the wholesaler sells it for, which is sometimes nothing more than ten to fifteen dollars over what the manufacturer sells it to them. That's why you hardly ever see huge single sale prices on consoles; too close to retail already.
And, Playstation 2 is manufactured by Sony, who also owns not only a computer division, but a home electronics division. And they had a major windfall from their original Playstation, so the money going into R&D for the next generation was there.
How hard would it really be to create the hardware for the PS2 all in house for about $200-$240, really? The PS2 is the *only* true in-house console out there.
Microsoft and Nintendo may sell at a loss, but Sony has no reason to do so. The price reductions are more because they've had the items in production long enough and R&D costs recuped that they can bring that price down without a further loss.
Except that the party in this instance was selling chips for laser printer toner cartridges. So it very well could be a third-party company targeting businesses.
But who buys more ink, businesses or people? Most businesses should care how well the ink works in the end. Those important contracts, samples from the art department, financial filings . . .
If the ink sucks and smears even after drying, or fades, or cracks, or is otherwise useless after a very short time, then the business should find an alternative to save itself headaches down the road, even if it costs a bit more.
I'll say this is good because NO company should ever try to lock people into propietary accessories by selling the initial main product at, close to or below cost, hoping to make up their profits by selling the locked-in accessories for a larger portion of the profits.
Look at the Playstation 2. It's locked-in (you must have Sony approve of and produce your game in _most_ instances), yet they make their profits on the game system whether or not you buy any games.
Let's see how long before other companies discover ways to break the models of these lock-ins and force the main company to rethink their strategy of selling short and hoping for bigger profits as time goes on because no one else can sell the accessories at reasonable prices.
How weird.
The DMCA *does not* allow the ISP or carrier to destroy the items requested to be removed, just to remove them. They cannot destroy them because if the hosted site counterclaims, then the ISP or carrier must put the items back up.
Diebold should be more careful in their requests.
I have an interest, but not an overwhelming interest, in downloading free music. My priorities, however, are:
C) Get a single song for a decent price ($.99 is reasonable; $3.49 for a CD of a single isn't);
That would be free as in beer, right?
Writers can earn money from in-house commitments, book tours where they further promote their books, public readings that they can be paid for, lectures, guests at conventions and trade shows, prizes from awards, commissions for specific pieces, etc.
No, they can't do a music tour per say, but they definitely have more than royalty checks to earn income.
I pointed this out to someone years ago who always loved to argue. "Why do we need Braille on drive-up ATMs?"
Their response? "Maybe a blind person is sitting in the rear or passenger seat and wants to use the machine."
"Fine, how do they read the screen?"
Errrr . . .
Yeah, like we pay for Windows!
[it's a joke!]
Isn't having a registrar run the root AND a registry one of the problems that's causing this today?
.com or .net registry, even if they're later bought or merged.
We need an independent company to run the root, and ensure that their contract states that they can never be a
[shamelessly stolen from The Simpsons]
"No Windows allowed!"
"But you allow X Window System in!"
"No Window_S_ allowed! We can have one!"
Why on earth if someone changes a policy that somehow will affect mass P2P traders, etc., it's some underhanded effort behind the scenes of one of the hated groups, SCO, MS, RIAA, MPAA, etc.?
Could it just be that bandwidth costs money, and some people just use way too much of it? That perhaps this usage could hinder others in the area or across the whole network?
Nah, usual paranoia sets in, it must be the RIAA strongarming them to change their policy so people have to take an extra thirty seconds to download that song off Kazaa . . .
And the software shipping with bad default options.
To this day, why does Microsoft ship Windows with Windows Messaging System turned on and allows connections on port 135? Sure, some businesses need it, but wouldn't it be wiser to shut those completely off by default, and allow competent IT professionals turn them on if they're needed?
That's why companies pay those people the big money, to make things work!
Do what I've been doing for a while.
Around here we have a chain of CD/Game pawn shops. They sell new items at retail or roughly close to it. They also sell quite a few more used items.
All of their used CDs are open-cases. They also have a CD deck so they can keep music going at all times. If you want, go by the genre you want (neatly arranged) and find some used CDs of bands you haven't heard before, or maybe that you have but haven't heard the CDs.
Ask the clerk if you can listen to it on the CD deck. They've very cordial about it at this chain. Listen to a few songs. If you're there to buy, they won't mind taking this extra time to help you.
You can also find $2, $1, $.50 and $.25 CDs (budgets), which are just used CDs they either have too many of, or haven't moved for a while. Not all of them are great, but you may find a diamond in the rough, and it won't cost you much.
It'll take some time out of your day, but if you're going to save money, might as well invest some research into doing so.